Alan Kay Quotes

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the "Aha." Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in - the one that we think is reality.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view
the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors
is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when and for what.

[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, ...

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

I think the trick with knowledge is to "acquire it, and forget all except the perfume" - because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own "brain voices". The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

Technology is anything invented after you were born.

Context is worth 80 IQ points.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for example, is just travel to a lot of different countries and you'll find a thousand different ways of thinking the world is real, all of which are just stories inside of people's heads. That's what we are too. Normal is just a construct, and to the extent that you can see normal as a construct in yourself, you have freed yourself from the constraints of thinking this is the way the world is. Because it isn't. This is the way we are.

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships,

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.